Nope, the Star Wars actor was not fired-he quit! Hayden Christensen turned his back on his role of Anakin Skywalker after finding fame in the Star Wars prequels.

For more than a decade, Hayden had owned the role of Anakin, starting when he was 19 in Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones. Then, the 34-year-old actor, packed it all up to go live on a farm.

“I felt like I had this great thing in Star Wars that provided all these opportunities and gave me a career, but it all kind of felt a little too handed to me,” Hayden said to the LA Times. “I didn’t want to go through life feeling like I was just riding a wave.”

Hayden Christensen starred his first movie in five years, 90 Minutes in Heaven, which was released in September, but earned some negative reviews. He insisted that having a lower profile makes him happier, however, saying that he gets to do things on his own and earn what he gets.

Image from youtube.com

“You can’t take years off and not have it affect your career,” Hayden Christensen said. “But I don’t know – in a weird, sort of destructive way there was something appealing about that to me.”

“There was something in the back of my head that was like, ‘If this time away is gonna’ be damaging to my career, then so be it. If I can come back afterwards and claw my way back in then maybe I’ll feel like I earned it,” the actor continued.

Back in 2007, Pop Sugar’s article about Hayden showed that [at that time] the former Star Wars cast had just bought himself a farm. Here’s how it went:

“I recently acquired a farm north of Toronto,” Hayden Christensen shared, “and I just bought a big excavator and a dump truck and a bobcat – construction toys. I plan to start building soon. I can’t wait to go out there and move dirt and get my hands dirty. It’s currently a hay farm, but I want it to be a working farm.”

Hayden Christensen in a farm-inspired clothing line video.

“I want to fill the barn with livestock. First pigs, then cattle and horses. Lifestyle has a lot to do with how often you end up in the tabloids,” Hayden shared. “Daniel Day-Lewis went to Italy and became a cobbler. I went out and bought construction equipment,” he added.

To date, the actor is now living a low-profile kind of life and enjoying his time on the farm.

Speculations had gone around that Hayden Christensen might briefly appear in the newest Star Wars movie, The Force Awakens, in a vision of his character’s battle with the dark and light side, but ultimately it was Ewan McGregor’s Obi-Wan that spoke with Rey.